


The Intromissive Organ of the Barnacle: a Philosophical Approach

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Age of Sail, M/M, Old Married Couple, Pirates, barnacles, cross-catharpins, shacks built of Nova Scotian planking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-05 20:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5388392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jack and Stephen are rescued from their island, shipwrecked, and rescued again, and Killick is not amused.</p>
<p>Written for the 2015 perfect_duet Advent Calendar, with love to all of Aubreyad fandom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Intromissive Organ of the Barnacle: a Philosophical Approach

* * *

 

_“So the Surprises had news of us in Spanish Town and came racing down, all canvas spread, to find whereabouts we might have been marooned. For, do you see, Sophie, it was impossible for the pirates to say exactly where...”_

Four bells struck and Jack Aubrey lifted his head from his letter, but the _Surprise_ ’s steady gentle roll and the soughing of the wind in her rigging assured him all was well, all in hand, and he need not stir. He read back over his last sheet, the tapping of the pen’s feathered tip against his lips measuring out the close-packed lines. It was a more jumbled account even than usual, since it could hardly reach Woolcombe before he himself did and it need therefore only play second fiddle to his firsthand testimony. He would tell Sophie the story as soon as he got home, and she would exclaim in horror and wonder and hug him close, as she always did those first days; and later she would sit opposite him, reading his letter by firelight and glancing over at him to reassure herself of his present safety and occasionally to ask for clarification of the nautical terms that would keep creeping in, despite his attempts to write in language so plain that the merest landlubber could follow it.

In any case, notwithstanding his many years of practice at recounting his travels to his wife and to the Admiralty, he was aware that his narrative abilities were somewhat lacking both in coherence and in grammar, or, as he put it, “I should make a sad cake of writing stories, was I to try.”

_“...and it was impossible for the pirates to say exactly where their unfortunate_ Revenge _had been wrecked, with us aboard,”_ he continued, _“they having been blown so far off course and those waters being so beset by tiny islands and uncharted reefs. They might have been willing enough to try, God knows, the Governor of Jamaica having declared himself minded to spare from the noose any man who could point out on a map our whereabouts and so enable our rescue before we perished of want. Any man or indeed any woman, I should say, for some of the Revenges were females, poor things, and those who could not plead their bellies might have been ready to save their necks by other means.”_

He looked across at Stephen Maturin, who lay with his knees drawn up in his old accustomed cot against the sleeping cabin’s larboard bulkhead, scribbling into a notebook by the light of a horn lantern.

“Stephen, with regard to those Revenges – those of them dressed in duck trowsers, you know – what would the correct term be for a woman who is a—”

“It is Sophie you are writing to, is it not?” Stephen cut in, the motion of his pencil never ceasing. “I do not advise you what to put; I merely observe that she may be unfamiliar with the very existence of such people, let alone their exact taxonomy.”

Jack frowned. “The correct term for a woman who is a _pirate_ , is all I was going to say.”

“Ah. In that case I cannot tell. ‘Piratess’, perhaps? ‘Petticoated privateer’? Yet that would be out of the true line, they having played the breeches part, and admirably well too.”

Jack picked up his pen again and dipped it into the inkwell. It was true that Sophie never saw what she did not choose to see, and that the lives of the few remaining buccaneers of the Caribbean seas were so far outside her own experience that attempting to explain to her how a handful of them were women—and breeched women at that, scornful of men, and unrepentant and fierce in their loves—would be as fruitless as trying to explain to her the difference between a cathead and a cross-catharpin. It might indeed be done, were sufficient effort applied, but it would hardly add to the world’s stock of happiness.

He turned again to his letter, taking a fresh sheet to re-tell the story from the start.

_“You must have heard long since how the_ Epimetheus _, that temporary command of mine, ran post-haste for home, racing away up the American coast and picking up the true westerlies off Newfoundland. An unhealthy ship she might have been, but no sluggard, and I had had her bottom lately cleaned, thank God, so she was trailing not a speck of weed on her journey across the Atlantic, and they tell me it was in near-record time that she dropped anchor off Sheerness.”_

This was a good solid beginning, surely, although “bottom” might be low. He struck it out just in case and wrote “keel” instead. And yet, and yet, this was not the beginning at all. He would have to start even further back.

_“Our unfortunate_ Epimetheus _, of course, had been taken as a prize by the French frigate_ Euterpe _, 32 guns, in the Caribbean, but our hands had subsequently rebelled against the prize-crew and retaken the vessel, though not before Stephen and I had been removed to the_ Euterpe _and held captive there.”_

There: that should be sufficient explanation for Sophie. There was no need to elaborate on the horrors of their imprisonment on the fever-ridden French ship and their desperate swim to safety, only to find themselves on an uninhabited isle with no means of escape.

_“You may have heard, too, that when the news of the_ Epimetheus _’s return to England reached Tom Pullings down in Shelmerston, he and fourscore Shelmerstonians worked double tides to complete the fitting-out of the_ Surprise _to come and rescue us. Tom tells me they weighed anchor in under a week, with barely half of her complement aboard; but every man a willing volunteer, every man an old shipmate of ours, most of them bearing scars stitched up on one cruise or another by old Stephen, and all determined to hunt down the French frigate, to sink her and destroy her or at any rate to make her pay.”_

The _Surprise_ heeled a little more strongly, and the bulkhead alongside Jack’s writing desk gave its familiar oaken creak of disapproval. She was an elderly ship, a sixth-rate of the last century, and had been sadly damaged in the storms of the previous autumn, and her re-fitting in Shelmerston had been a hasty affair, hastily concluded, but she was a tight, weatherly vessel nonetheless, and Jack’s heart rejoiced to be back in her.

_“The_ Euterpe _had long since made good her escape, however, and not a whisker have we heard of her since, but when Tom reached Jamaican waters he luckily put in at Spanish Town, where the Governor took him to the gaol and showed him the crew of the ship that had picked me and Stephen up from the mosquito-ridden island on which the French had abandoned us. She was the_ Revenge _, an ancient but sturdy sloop originally out of Halifax, once under his own commission but which had turned unlicensed privateer—a nest of pirates, they were, Sophie, though they liked to call themselves by the old-fashioned romantical term of ‘buccaneer’, and who had taken to beating back and forth between the outlying islands, picking off the smallest of the merchant ships and helping themselves to the sugar and rum. Rascals, no doubt, and they meant only to ransom us for whatever they could get, but we were grateful enough to be rescued, whomsoever by. Stephen, indeed, who you know can be defiance itself when his mettle is up, told their captain that they had undervalued us, that we were worth far more than they had meant to ask.”_

Jack drew a flourish at the end of his paragraph and blew on the ink until it was dry. Then he looked up at Stephen’s cot, watching the steady progress of his pencil across the paper, line after line.

After a minute or two Stephen sighed, closed his notebook and blew out his lantern. He removed his spectacles and propped them, along with notebook and pencil, upon his hanging shelf.

“Either the scratching of your pen has paused this inordinate length of time whilst you chase the perfect epithet with which to convey your exploits to your wife,” he said, “or you wish to ask me something. In the latter case, Jack, I advise that you grasp the nettle and ask.”

Jack tapped the last leaf of his letter. “Who was that classical cove again, Stephen? The one with the ransom?”

“I collect you mean Julius Caesar and his twenty talents. He it was who advised his captors they must hold out for fifty or be mocked for the paltriness of their ambition, their failure to understand his consequence. I close my eyes now, brother, do you mark? I sleep, I sleep, and I beg you spare me any wit you might be hatching on the subject of talents or anything else. Good night now, Jack, my dear. You will not forget to extinguish your candle.”

Jack took up his pen to add a final line or two before he turned in.

_“It was Julius Caesar, of course, who made the original crack, and you might have young George look it up in his books. How I should love to hear him tell it over to Stephen in the original Latin (or Greek, as it might be) when we land! Good night, Sophie. God bless you and keep you safe.”_

 

* * *

 

Six bells in the morning watch, and Jack regarded the new additions to his letter, in which he had reverted some time since to domestic details. He wondered whether he ought to remind Sophie to order bricks for the icehouse, and not from Barsker this time—there had been too many unevenly-fired bricks in the last load, too many by far...

“What icehouse, Jack?”

Jack glanced up; he had not been aware he was speaking aloud, nor that Stephen had woken.

“The Woolcombe icehouse,” he said. “I gave you an account of it back on our atoll, though perhaps you did not fully attend. The one to be built down near Asterley Pond, so that we may have ices at summer balls when the girls are old enough to be brought out. Barrel-roofed, I thought, with a vaulted ceiling and side-wings, to make a cross shape, you know. It took me some considerable time to work out the quantity of brickwork required; the tide had drawn out and was halfway in again before I was done. I find I grow old, and my volumetric mathematics is not all it once was; though to be sure there was time and enough to spare, with so little else to be done on that accursed shore.”

“Vaulted ceilings, is it now?” said Stephen. “I believe you may indeed have mentioned something to that effect on one of the various occasions on which you were so kind as to break up the soporific rhythm or perhaps I might say _lullaby_ of the surf: valuable interruptions without which I might not have managed to stay wakeful for quite as long as I did.”

Jack regarded his old friend critically. There were creases under Stephen’s eyes and across his cheeks, stark in the guttering candlelight, and not all from the coarse wrinkled canvas of his pillow; they would not all fade with the coming dawn. Stephen had always been cross-grained in the morning watch, however, and although one could not teach sleeping dogs new tricks, breakfast might yet perform wonders to behold.

“Killick!” Jack called. “Killick, there! Coffee for the Doctor, hot as you like.”

Killick stuck his head around the door, his hair awry and cast all to larboard as if he had been sleeping up against the lee bulkhead. He glared at Jack, then at Stephen, and then back at Jack. Then he disappeared, muttering as he went, the only audible words of which were “Never too late to drown the pair of ’em.”

 

* * *

 

“Accursed shore”, Jack had called it, and yet the atoll on which the _Revenge_ had been wrecked by an unseasonal storm had been a place of some peace, despite the endless beating of the breakers upon its outlying reefs. There had been little to do there but fish in the lagoon and collect birds’ eggs and rig sails to catch the overnight dews. On the first day after the wreck Jack had fashioned a makeshift shack out of the various pieces of planking that had drifted ashore, but once he had lashed together the longest of the surviving spars and tied his shirt to the tip to make a signal flag, he had had no other duties to attend to, nothing else that could be done to ensure his and Stephen’s survival or rescue.

_“A solid little cabin it was,”_ he wrote, _“built of the_ Revenge _’s good Nova Scotian timber, though I had only a handful of scavenged nails with which to fix the planks, and brittle coral rock for a hammer. And we were glad enough of its shelter, too, for the day after the hurricane the winds howled as if to destroy what little of the_ Revenge _was left, beating its hulk upon the reefs until nothing but driftwood remained; and yet our cabin stood. Many of the Revenges had been far gone in drink, and only Stephen and I could swim well enough to reach the part of the atoll’s rim projecting above the waves. Most of the poor wretches were taken by the reef sharks as soon as the ship foundered; and although we saw some few escape in the jollyboat, the seas were monstrous, and we assumed them drowned and ourselves the only survivors. It was not until weeks later, when Tom Pullings saw our signal flag and sent the_ Surprise _’s cutter racing in through the gap in the reef, that I learned the truth: that the jollyboat’s crew had managed to reach Jamaica and had been taken up there for piracy.”_

Jack paused over this last sentence. He had sent a message to the Governor of Spanish Town pleading for leniency for the Revenges, for they had saved his life and Stephen’s, albeit in the most roundabout of manners; and although his heart cried out against piracy they had been kindly enough in their rough democratical way. This, however, he decided against telling Sophie, as her wrath against anyone who broke the God-given penal codes was stern and unbending in proportion to her own rectitude.

_“Weeks later, it was, and long weeks they were too. Lacking anything to use as a net, we had little success in catching fish, and you will not be surprised to hear that we were both heartily tired of seabirds’ eggs by the time the Surprises found us. My foot, at least, has healed up well, Stephen having extracted the last remnant of sea-urchin spine from it and bound it up in a snakeskin to protect against the sharp coral rocks. A fresh skin, I mean, not one of those papery shed skins that fall apart in your hands. We boiled the snake's insides for soup but it was thick with tiny bones; not a dish you could wish to serve at a smart supper-party. Stephen assured me that no venom attached to either the flesh or the epidermis of the creature, however, though he laughed all the while and I trusted him not. I have known him testify shamelessly to the innocent nature of any animal under the sun, should he wish to bring it aboard with him. ‘Oh it is the mildest most inoffensive of creatures,’ he will say, ‘it has imbibed the milk of reptile kindness at its mother’s knee, so it has, Jack,’ and I will let him bring the villainous brute aboard, and lo within the hour I shall be bit and lying on my deathbed, or thereabouts.”_

He considered that same shameless teller of untruths, who was sitting in his nightshirt still, making a fair copy of whatever account he had been writing the night before and coating himself and his garment immoderately with ink in the process.

Stephen perceived Jack’s gaze with that uncanny ability he had always possessed of telling when he was being watched. “Have you finished your letter, so?” he said. “Did you remember to tell Sophie about the barnacles?”

“About the...?”

“Barnacles,” said Stephen, turning. “About my theory of their intromissive organs: of how the spacing—the wide spacing—of their carapaces upon the planking of which you built our little cabin, and upon all such marine or littoral surfaces, is hardly commensurate with their bodily size; so that if they are to mate with their conspecifics we must suppose them to possess an organ immoderately long.”

“I have not. You can tell her yourself, Stephen, if you think fit, or you might keep it for one of your learned organisations. You might submit a paper to the Royal Society; I dare say they would find it fascinating.”

“Perhaps I will,” said Stephen, with a frown which, to anyone less well acquainted with him than Jack, might have concealed his deep undercurrent of amusement. “Yes, perhaps it would be more to their taste than to Sophie’s, after all.” He scratched behind his ear with his pen, leaving a smear of ink upon his neck.

Jack watched the ink slide, watched it reach a droplet of sweat and mingle and run faster, until it paused at the hollow of the collarbone. He reached out and smoothed the discoloured streak across to the dip where collarbone met breastbone.

Stephen laid his pen carefully down on the table. “Another five days before we reach England, is it now, Jack?”

“Six, at the outside.” Jack ran his finger down the damp, stained cotton of Stephen’s shirt, down the breastbone, across his hollow belly and over the ridge of his hip. It was a figure still desperately gaunt, in spite of the best efforts of the _Surprise_ ’s cook.

“Six days,” said Stephen, “and nothing better to do than to spoil my best nightgown. Killick will scold.”

Jack checked the door and then wedged a chair solidly behind its handle. “Let him scold.”

Stephen laughed, a rare creaking unlovely sound. “It is always intromissive organs you are thinking of, I find, whether we be cast away on a desert atoll or safe aboard the _Surprise_.”

“It is.” Jack lifted him bodily onto the table, scattering the papers, and began to nuzzle at the salty skin of his neck with small biting kisses that dropped from ear to collar and then lower.

Stephen let himself fall back onto his elbow, gasping, trying to tug his nightshirt up and pull Jack close all at once. “Theoretical philosophy does have its place,” he said, his voice unsteady, “but it is true that...one should always...test one’s hypotheses...”

The words trailed away into an incoherent mumble as Jack yanked the shirt off and tossed it aside. And although the ship’s bell continued to measure out the forenoon watch with its accustomed pattern of time immemorial, in the privacy of the _Surprise_ ’s Great Cabin it rang unheard.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Note 1: If you would like to read more of Stephen and Jack's escape from the French frigate _Euterpe_ , that story was told in my previous fic "Gaol Fever".
> 
> Note 2: You can see a fine icehouse similar to the one Jack was thinking of at Rode Hall in Cheshire.


End file.
